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Summary
Summary
From shuttered factories to look-alike high streets and shopping centres, the Western world has been transformed by its relentless fixation on low prices. This pervasive yet little examined obsession is arguably the most powerful and devastating market force of today - the engine of globalisation, outsourcing, planned obsolescence and economic instability in an increasingly unsettled world. In this myth-shattering, closely reasoned and exhaustively reported investigation, Shell exposes the astronomically high cost of living ''cheap''.
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Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Atlantic correspondent Shell (The Hungry Gene) tackles more than just "discount culture" in this wide-ranging book that argues that the American drive toward bargain-hunting and low-price goods has a hidden cost in lower wages for workers and reduced quality of goods for consumers. After a dry examination of the history of the American retail industry, the author examines the current industrial and political forces shaping how and what we buy. In the book's most involving passages, Shell deftly analyzes the psychology of pricing and demonstrates how retailers manipulate subconscious bargain triggers that affect even the most knowing consumers. The author urges shoppers to consider spending more and buying locally, but acknowledges the inevitability of globalization and the continuation of trends toward efficient, cost-effective production. The optimistic call to action that concludes the book feels hollow, given the evidence that precedes it. If Shell illuminates with sharp intelligence and a colloquial style the downside of buying Chinese garlic or farm-raised shrimp, nothing demonstrates how consumers, on a mass scale, could seek out an alternative or why they would choose to do so. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Americans love a bargain, but sometimes what looks like a bargain is not such a good deal when you take a closer look. That is the premise of this Atlantic correspondent's take on the trend toward wholesale mass consumerism as purveyed by discount stores, dollar stores, outlet malls, and big-box stores. Shell traces the roots of discount pricing from the 5-and-10-cent stores like Woolworth's to the cheesy urban discount appliance and electronics stores of the 1960s to the well-established chain stores of today like Target, IKEA, Kmart, and Walmart. She investigates the psychology of price versus value, the tendency to purchase too many cheap items we don't really need instead of a few quality items we do, and the real cost of those low, low prices: the loss of craftsmanship, items that are made to break, and the drive for ever-cheaper labor and the poor working conditions that follow. Shell's cautionary tale shows how the way we shop and the shortsighted ways we think about money contribute to wage stagnation and a lower standard of living.--Siegfried, David Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ELLEN RUPPEL SHELL has been studying the price, the value and the cost of things - all sorts of things, bookcases and summer dresses and plastic wrap and key chains and tube socks and hammers. And shrimp, the subject of a brief, appalling tale that illustrates what she's up to in this important book. Until the 1970s or so, shrimp was a luxury for most Americans. Thanks to a huge boom in shrimp farming, especially in Thailand, supplies soared during the '80s, and prices started to fall. Now, Ruppel Shell reports in "Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture," we eat shrimp as casually as we eat tuna fish - more casually, in fact, since our consumption of shrimp actually outstrips our consumption of canned tuna. If you order shrimp at a midrange restaurant like Red Lobster, you get a hefty portion for about $16 - and if you're there during the annual "Endless Shrimp" promotion, you can keep on ordering until you topple right over into the garlic butter. It's still only $16. The downside? According to Ruppel Shell, a contributing editor for The Atlantic, it's all downside, and billions of rubbery shrimp are the least of it. For a while, there were some newly affluent shrimp-farmers along the coast of Thailand as traditional operations were transformed into gigantic factories with the help of international lenders and investors. Massive onslaughts of chemicals made the factories productive, but fish - like cows and pigs and chickens - do not flourish in the long run under such extreme, artificial conditions. They get sick, and their ponds become black holes of pollution and toxic waste. "What followed was ruinous debt, environmental degradation, horrifying human rights abuses and violence that left millions destitute," Ruppel Shell writes. Moral: Despite what's jotted down on the restaurant check, there's no such thing as cheap shrimp. And as Ruppel Shell makes clear in a brisk, persuasive set of examples, a great many other price tags are deceptive as well. At the big discount stores, most discounts are applied to everyday necessities like toothpaste and lettuce. Brand-name clothing and appliances may be no bargain at all. "Wal-Mart actually has higher than average prices on about one-third of the stock it carries," Ruppel Shell writes. "On those items for which prices are lower, the average savings is 37 cents, with about one-third of items carrying a savings of no more than 2 cents. The lower food prices, however, do impress a number of economists, who argue that the discounts benefit everyone by forcing down food prices all over town. "Even if you never shop at Wal-Mart, you are still better off with Wal-Mart nearby," the M.I.T. economist Jerry Hausman told Ruppel Shell, and he judged that effect to be "the equivalent of 25 percent of food spending." Yet his study compared only the cost - not the quality - of largely generic items. "How are consumers to know whether the lower price of chicken breasts at Wal-Mart" signifies "a good deal on a superior product or a bad deal on an inferior product?" Ruppel Shell wonders. Plainly it would be awkward to advise a struggling homemaker that she really ought to be spending more on her daughter's new shoes, and Ruppel Shell doesn't go that far. But she does show that the impact of rock-bottom prices on a stringent family budget is to some extent illusory. "Discounts don't compensate for the staggering and rising costs of essentials - housing, education and health care," she emphasizes. Cheap chicken, cheap shirts, cheap sneakers - they're all being paid for by somebody, even if it's not the person taking them home. More than a third of the working poor, Ruppel Shell notes, have jobs in retail, where the annual mean wage for a department store "associate" is $18,280. That's one reason we pay so little for those shirts and sneakers. We're also being subsidized by a distant labor force we never see, the Chinese and Mexicans and Vietnamese who work under well-documented Dickensian conditions. As Ruppel Shell acknowledges, sweatshops represent a step up from the miserable rural poverty these young men and women left behind. But the workers themselves have no leverage to demand higher wages or more humane treatment, since manufacturers can go almost anywhere in the world to find a more compliant work force. Of course, American companies claim to investigate and audit their overseas factories, but most abuses are never uncovered. The local bosses are very good at hiding offenses and falsifying documents. "We lecture our kids on social responsibility and then buy them toys assembled by destitute child workers on some far-flung foreign shore," Ruppel Shell writes. "Somehow the Age of Cheap has raised cognitive dissonance to a societal norm." ROBERT POLLIN, an economist at the University of Massachusetts, told Ruppel Shell that raising the wages of a worker in Mexico by 30 percent would add only 1.2 percent to the price of a shirt - that's 24 cents on a $20 shirt. Most companies won't hear of it. Cost-cutting is the only value they recognize, in part because profit margins are so narrow that companies can't afford to compete on any basis except ever-lower prices. An American dream once fueled by ideas and entrepreneurship has been reduced to laying off workers and reducing risk. "When prices are kept too low, innovation is nearly impossible," the Harvard economist Robert Lawrence told Ruppel Shell. Apparently we're not even building better mousetraps anymore - just cheaper ones. Ruppel Shell doesn't conclude with any grand ideas for reshaping the world's economy, though she praises Wegmans and Costco, arguing that they manage to thrive without doing a lot of damage. But she doesn't need to formulate grand ideas here. She's delivered something much more valuable: a first-rate job of reporting and analysis. Pay full price for this book, if you can stand to. It's worth it. At the big discount stores, brand-name clothing and appliances may be no bargain at all. Laura Shapiro is the author of three books including "Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America."
Choice Review
Does it bother you to find an item on sale that you paid full price for? Ever wonder why it costs more to repair that beloved television than simply buy another? What are the true costs of an obsession with low prices? Shell (journalism, Boston Univ.) presents a detailed, well-researched, and alarming exploration of these questions. As if following the call of the Sirens, customers are seduced into discount stores and mesmerized by clearance sections without recognizing the societal costs of creating those bargains. Similar to Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (2001), this work presents a harrowing global view of exploitation, excess, and "good" business practices in the quest for ever-lower prices by seller and buyer alike. Knowledge, Shell concludes, is a scarce commodity in the marketplace. This book alleviates that gap with a careful analysis of the motivations, influences, and social as well as economic costs that go into the love of a bargain and the need to steal that deal. In an economy where paying full price is frowned upon, the insights in this book are worth the retail price. In sum, an intelligent examination of society's concessions to low prices. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers; all levels of students; faculty and practitioners. S. M. Mohammed SUNY Fredonia
Kirkus Review
Or, supersaturate me with enough junk to clog the arteries of the good life. Those who remember the early 1970s, writes Atlantic contributor Shell (Fat Wars: The Inside Story of the Obesity Industry, 2004, etc.), may be surprised to learn that, even for all the decline in relative wages and buying power, most of the necessities of life are cheaper today. We pay about a third less for clothing, about a fifth less for food and a quarter less for cars. This lowering of cost, Shell warns, comes at a hidden price, and there lies the heart of her argument, which is as much aesthetic as financial. One of the costs of cheap goods is obvious: Manufacturers chase cheap labor across the planet in order to produce them, which in turn lowers the labor value of American workers. Another of the costs is less obvious: Inexpensive goods devalue the notion of craft. "The ennoblement of Cheap," writes Shell, "marks a particularly radical departure in American culture and a titanic shift in our national priorities." The author traces that departure across a trajectory of opinion in which, a century ago, the purchase of mass-produced, inexpensive goods was considered a lapse of taste. This view was largely undone by pioneering merchants such as John Wanamaker (of Philadelphia department-store fame) and Eugene Ferkauf (of Korvette's), as well as the postWorld War II emergence of a particularly acquisitive consumer culture that, as John Kenneth Galbraith grumbled, nursed a battery of "wants that previously did not exist." Shell's pronouncements on economics get a bit fuzzy, but her Silent Springlike moralizing about the effects of superabundant, indifferently made goods will find an eager audience among acolytes of the uncluttered, simple, debt-free life. Diligent, useful cultural criticism, akin to Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (2004) and Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic (2008). Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Just in time for the current economic recession, Shell (The Hungry Gene: The Insider Story of the Obesity Industry) investigates America's fixation with discount retail prices. Historically, consumers have believed that "buying cheap" was "buying smart," but Shell assembles convincing evidence that our appetite for cheap products has led to an explosion of "shoddy clothes, unreliable electronics, wobbly furniture and questionable food." She points out that the rise of the Industrial Revolution in this country saw the simultaneous rise of mass production, which fostered the aims of early retail pioneers such as John Wanamaker and F.W. Woolworth. Now, with its cheap labor force producing cheap goods for the American market, China is largely responsible for much of the discount boom prevalent today. Ironically, Americans have significantly curtailed their buying, thus impacting retailers and in turn causing enormous problems for the Chinese economy. Shell rightly concludes that "technology, globalization and deregulation have made competition a death march," forcing companies to eliminate jobs, lower quality standards, and depress wages, all with the purpose of creating cheaper goods, resulting in a kind of unending vicious cycle. Verdict This highly intelligent and disturbing book provides invaluable insight into our consumer culture and should be mandatory reading for anyone trying to figure out our current financial mess. As Shell proves, the hunt for cheap products has hurt us all. Highly recommended for smart readers. -Richard Drezen, formerly with the Washington Post/New York City Bureau (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Note to Readers | p. xiii |
Introduction: Gresham's Law | p. 1 |
1 Discount Nation | p. 7 |
2 The Founding Fathers | p. 30 |
3 Winner Take Nothing | p. 55 |
4 The Outlet Gambit | p. 88 |
5 Markdown Madness | p. 109 |
6 Death of a Craftsman | p. 125 |
7 Discounting and its Discontents | p. 149 |
8 Cheap Eats | p. 163 |
9 The Double-Headed Dragon | p. 188 |
10 The Perfect Price | p. 207 |
Acknowledgments | p. 233 |
Notes | p. 239 |
Bibliography | p. 281 |
Index | p. 287 |